Christine Keung

Project Goal

Empower village women to reduce water and soil pollution in rural China

Location: Northwest China

Born on 5 April 1992, Keung’s earliest years were spent in Shanghai and Hong Kong, but she was educated in the US after emigrating with her parents at the age of four.

She graduated with a BA from Wellesley College, majoring in economics, and, in 2014, she was made a Fulbright Research Fellow. More recently, she was granted deferred acceptance to Harvard Business School through its unique 2+2 Program, designed to identify high-potential undergraduate students from around the world to attend the school for two years following graduation. Keung says she plans to defer the programme to continue the work she started in China.

Keung’s fascination with Northwestern China stemmed from her parents’ experience during the Cultural Revolution. Her father’s experience as a “sent-down” youth in Xinjiang, a Uygur Autonomous Region of China, took him from the villages of the autonomous Kazakh prefecture of Ili on the border of Kazakhstan and Russia to the oilfields of Karamay. Fluent in English, Mandarin and two Chinese dialects (Cantonese and Shanghainese), in 2014, Keung was named one of the top 25 emerging leaders in US-China relations under the age of 25 by Yale University’s China Hands magazine, and, in 2015, was selected to be a delegate at Stanford University’s Forum for American-Chinese Exchange.